The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania has as a goal expanding opportunities for undergraduates to conduct significant research and promoting the products of this research. CUREJ, the College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, was developed in collaboration with the Penn Libraries to achieve this goal

DeTurck, Dennis

Griscom, Richard

English

ScholarlyCommons@Penn

University of PennsylvaniaScholarlyCommonsScholarship at Penn Libraries Penn LibrariesOctober 2007Publishing Undergraduate Research ElectronicallyDennis DeTurckUniversity of PennsylvaniaRichard GriscomUniversity of Pennsylvania, griscom@pobox.upenn.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papersPresentation given at EDUCAUSE 2007, Seattle, Washington, on 24 October 2007.This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/45For more information, please contact libraryrepository@pobox.upenn.edu.Recommended CitationDeTurck, D., & Griscom, R. (2007). Publishing Undergraduate Research Electronically. Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/45Publishing Undergraduate Research ElectronicallyAbstractThe College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania has as a goal expanding opportunities forundergraduates to conduct significant research and promoting the products of this research. CUREJ, theCollege Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, was developed in collaboration with the Penn Librariesto achieve this goal.CommentsPresentation given at EDUCAUSE 2007, Seattle, Washington, on 24 October 2007.This presentation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/45Publishing Undergraduate ResearchElectronicallyDennis DeTurck and Richard Griscom∗24 October 2007educauseSeattle1 Introduction [DeTurck]• The context of Penn [click] Southernmost Ivy League school Founded by Benjamin Franklin• [click] The four undergraduate schools2 Undergraduate Research at Penn[click] [click]• The story of two undergraduate researchers [click] Boris Zinshteyn [click] Tom Prior• Examples of the variety of research in CUREJ [click] Traditional written reports (Michael Gertner and Steven Thomas,The role of norepinephrine in spatial reference and spatial working mem-ory) [click] Creative arts (Julie Schneider, Alice Leaps) [click] Multimedia presentations of research (Emily Buzzell, Mortalityof US Troops in the Iraq War, 2003-2006)[click]∗ c©2007, Dennis DeTurck and Richard Griscom. This work is the intellectual property ofthe authors. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for noncommercial, educa-tional purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materialsand notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwiseor to republish requires written permission from the authors.13 Genesis of CUREJ• [click] Print journals and their problems [click]• [click] Reasons for decision to develop an electronic journal1. [click] Longer, greater impact; permanence2. [click] Increase understanding of undergraduate research3. [click] Inspire existing students and promote opportunities for prospectivestudents4. [click] Provide mentoring opportunities with faculty4 The Collaboration between the Library and theCollege of Arts and Sciences [Griscom]4.1 Recent history[click] The Library's work with the College on CUREJ wasn't our ﬁrst collaboration.During the past several years, the Library and the College of Arts and Sciences havehad a strong history of working together.4.1.1 Weigle Information Commons[click] The most visible product of our collaboration has been the Weigle InformationCommons, or the WIC. We began working together on this project because werealized that the School and the College share an interestand a responsibilityinimproving the academic experience of students and that we could help each other aswe work on this goal.The theme of the WIC itself is collaboration. The Library and the School developeda space in our main library to serve three purposes:1. To encourage group study and collaborative learning. This is done throughthe [click] College Technology Center. Because students' work increasinglyemphasizes group projects and shared learning experiences, they need space tocollaborate. The College Technology Center is designed to provide a technology-rich place to [click] meet, talk, research, draft position papers, [click] debate,interact with texts, work on presentation skills, and develop ﬁnal presentationsall with support staﬀ nearby.2. [click] The WIC provides equipment, training, and support for working withdigital media. The Vitale Digital Media Lab oﬀers the tools necessary to workwith video, audio, imaging, and web publishing. [click] The Lab has extendedoperating hours, and is attended by staﬀ who know the equipment and the craft;and3. [click] The WIC improves the presentation of research through eﬀective writ-ing, speaking, and visual design. Several academic support programs providewalk-in assistance to students in the WIC, where their combined presence pro-vides a single point of contact for students. The services already in place are2Research Skills, Time and Project Management, Communication within theCurriculum (CWiC), and Writing Skills.[click] The WIC is not intended to be a study hall. It's a place to work with staﬀand fellow students on research. It's not a computer lab, but a kind of workshopa resource that young scholars use in carrying out their academic apprenticeships.[click] By pulling these programs and physical resources together in a library facility,the School of Arts and Sciences and the Library took a major step toward integratingtheir shared priorities.4.1.2 Undergraduate research journal[click] Just over two years ago, in June 2005, during the planning stages for the WIC,Dean DeTurck was invited to a meeting of the library's Public Services Council, a groupcomprising all the librarians who work directly with students, staﬀ, and faculty. Ourhead of public services, the late Sandra Kerbel, regularly invited administrators likeDean DeTurck to our meetings so that we could be better informed about currentissues in the academic communities we serve.At this meeting, Dean DeTurck talked about major changes being put in placein the college curriculum and its renewed focus on research. During his discussion ofthe revised curriculum, he mentioned that part of the emphasis on research includedplans to inaugurate an electronic research journal to provide a showcase for the bestundergraduate research.4.2 ScholarlyCommons@Penn[click] Coincidentally, when the dean met with us, the library was rolling out ourinstitutional repository, ScholarlyCommons@Penn, to the campus at large. This web-based archive of campus research runs on the DigitalCommons software platform,which is developed and marketed by Bepress, the Berkeley Electronic Press.ScholarlyCommons@Penn had started in 2004 as a pilot project with the Schoolof Engineering, whose dean saw it as an eﬀective way to promote the research accom-plishments of the school.Once we had emerged from the pilot project, the library decided to open up therepository to the rest of campus, but we wanted to be careful not to overextendourselves, because at that point, all of the work on the repository was done by existinglibrary staﬀ whose principal jobs were in other areas. There were limits to the amountof work they could take on, so we had to pick and choose new participants carefully.The most attractive prospects were high-proﬁle departments that showed a strongcommitment to the repository.Sandra Kerbel, who had invited Dean DeTurck to the meeting, was one of thedriving forces behind the new institutional repository. When she heard the deanmention an electronic research journal, she immediately thought of the repository asa possible host. This was exactly the kind of high-proﬁle content she wanted to see inthe repository. After the meeting, she and Dean DeTurck met and began laying plansfor CUREJ.[click] During a six-month period, from fall 2005 to spring 2006, the library andthe college worked together on designing the interface for CUREJ and developingappropriate search and browse tools. The College settled on three broad topic areasthat correspond to the divisions of the college: Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, andthe Humanities.3This is what the CUREJ interface looks like. The page is quite a bit diﬀerent fromthe other ScholarlyCommons@Penn pages. The College did the web design, and theDigitalCommons support staﬀ adapted it to ﬁt the content. You'll see that there's anemphasis placed on divisions and departments. Over on the right are featured papersin each of the three divisions. On the left, the papers can be browsed by division andby department, so each unit within the college can have some sense of independentidentity on the site.5 Developing policies and procedures5.1 Selection and Nomination[click][click] After the site had been designed, a natural question arose: Who woulddecide what research is published in CUREJ? The College decided it would be amistake to open the site up to the posting of any paper by any undergraduate studentbecause they would lose all control over the quality or content.It was clear a vetting mechanism was needed, but who would do this vetting?[click] Opening it up to all faculty would not be manageable because of the hundredsof people involved. [click] The College decided to work through the ﬁfty undergrad-uate program chairs, a group of a more manageable size. [click] Individual facultywould be asked to recommend papers to their program chair, and then the chair wouldmake the formal nomination.[click] In eﬀect, then, the faculty in each discipline act as the editorial board fortheir area and there is peer pressure to keep the submissions of uniformly high qualityas well as to make sure the faculty's particular discipline is well represented.5.1.1 Project Recommendation Site[click] The next task was setting up a mechanism for these program chairs to recom-mend papers. The obvious choice was to create a web-driven form and an email-drivennotiﬁcation system so that program chairs could nominate papers from anywhere atanytime, and students could learn of the nomination and act on it regardless of whetherthey were in residence on campus.Ted Marvel, the web developer for the College of Arts and Sciences, designed andcoded the interface. His approach to designing web interfaces is to make them assimple and spare as possible. He's learned that if users run into any complicationsor become confused, they will simply abandon the form. It's not that they couldn'tﬁgure it out if they'd devote a bit of time to it; they simply won't because they lackthe patience.More to the point, when dealing with faculty, unless they are doing something thatthey consider to be in their own best interest, they're not likely to put a lot of eﬀortinto it unless the process is very simple.After Ted ﬁnished the interface, it was presented, along with the procedures, tothe ﬁfty undergraduate program chairs and met with approval.5.1.2 Program chair submits recommendation[click] To show you how the process works, let's imagine I'm the program chair for themusic department, and a faculty member in my department has a student composer,4Paul Westerberg, whose Musical Composition no. 3 is a piece she thinks is worthyof publication in CUREJ.There are seven ﬁelds I need to ﬁll out: My ﬁrst and last name, my email address,the project title, Paul's ﬁrst and last name, and his email address. That's all that'sneeded to get the process underway.[click] Once I click the submit box, a screen displays announcing that the recom-mendation was received, and that Paul has been notiﬁed by email.5.1.3 Notiﬁcation of nominee[click] This is what that email to Paul looks like. Again, the College took some carein composing the text of the message to make sure the steps were described as simplyand concisely as possibly.In this note, we tell Paul that his project has been approved for publication. Wetell him that he must ﬁll out an author agreement, and we give him the address of theoﬃce where the form should be submitted, and a link to the PDF form. We tell Paulhe will then need to submit his project, and we provide a link to instructions. Andﬁnally, we give an email address for questions.5.1.4 Author agreement[click] Here is the author agreement form. Of course, ideally the whole processwould be web-based, but we require this one piece of paper because the agreement issomething that needs to be signed and kept on ﬁle. The agreement basically grants uspermission to make the research project available permanently to the world at large.5.1.5 Submission[click] Next, Paul would create an account in ScholarlyCommons@Penn and uploadhis Musical Composition no. 3 into a holding queue in the repository. For textdocuments, the system can accept Microsoft-Word, Rich Text Format, or PDF ﬁles.For a graphical ﬁle like a music composition, the ﬁle would probably be submitted asa PDF. [click] The repository software converts the ﬁles, as needed, to PDF, andattaches a system-generated cover page so that each document in the repository hasa uniform appearance.The submission step is the one area where everything hasn't been going exactly asplanned. Initially, the College announced that 200 papers would be added each year.The number has fallen far short of that.So far, 175 papers have been recommended. Of these, only 71 have actually beenuploaded and posted.As it turned out, many students did not end up submitting their nominated papersto the site. Most of the nominated papers were by seniors, and they ﬁrst learnedthat their work had been nominated right before graduation. Last year the collegeannounced that the schedule would be adjusted so that the announcements wouldoccur earlier in the year in order to give those students who are graduating enoughtime to post their work before they leave campus.5.1.6 Review and posting[click] Once the paper is uploaded, Danielle Venit, the administrative staﬀ member inthe College who works with CUREJ, gets a message from ScholarlyCommons@Penn.5First, she logs into the administrative interface [click] She checks the uploaded ﬁleto make sure that it matches the recommended paper. She checks for typos in themetadata. She adds subject keywords and information on the advisor. And she checksto make sure the author agreement has been received.[click] Once the submission has cleared these hurdles, she then posts the paper.Paul receives system generated notiﬁcation that the paper is now available, and thenote includes the URL.So, at every step along the way, the author is notiﬁed of the progress of the paper.Once it has been published, the author receives email from the system each monthreporting the number of times the paper has been downloaded. It can be surprisingjust how many times these papers are downloaded. (More on that in a minute.)5.2 Creative Commons[click] The articles submitted to CUREJ are published under a Creative Commonslicense. For those of you who aren't familiar with Creative Commons licensing, it'sbasically a way for an author to retain rights to a piece of writing while authorizingcertain uses of the work.As it says on the Creative Commons site, Creative Commons deﬁnes the spectrumof possibilities between full copyrightall rights reservedand the public domainnorights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain usesof your work a 'some rights reserved' copyright.Creative Commons has developed a suite of licenses that allow authors to pick andchoose what they wish to allow others to do with their work. One goal of the CreativeCommons license is to encourage authors to retain their rights instead of signing themover to a publisher or an institution. An author who retains rights can then decidewho can do what with a piece of writing.The license used by CUREJ is the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-NoDerivitives license. If you click at the link on the bottom of the CUREJ site, you'llsee this deﬁnition of the license in plain English. Under this license, you, the reader,are allowed to copy and distribute the work provided (1) you attribute the work tothe author, (2) you don't sell the article, and (3) you leave the article intact, withoutchanges.6 Publicity and promotion of site [DeTurck][click]6.1 Articles in various Penn publications• A December 2005 article on the School of Arts and Sciences website:http://www.sas.upenn.edu/home/news/CUREJ.html• A January 2006 article in a university staﬀ newsletter [Gazette]http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0106/gaz02.html67 Content[click]7.1 A few sample papers• [click] http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/13/Suds and Selfhood: Marketing the Modern Woman in the 1920's, 1930's and1940's.If I go to Google [suds and selfhood], we'll see that this paper can be discoveredthrough a simple search on its title. Also [women ivory soap]• [click] http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/31/ Silent No Longer: Voicesof the 1967 Newark Race Riots, by Kimberly Siegal.The product of interviews with eye witnesses and people directly aﬀected by theriots.• [click] http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/15/Vicious Geography: The Spatial Organization of Prostitution in Twentieth Cen-tury Philadelphia, by Sarah S. Bertozzi.A study of the geographical distribution of prostitution in Philadelphia since1900.8 Impact [Griscom]8.1 Exposure and use[click] Once the initial papers in CUREJ had been published in spring 2006, weimmediately discovered that the students' submissions attracted a lot of attention andwere frequently downloaded. In fact, the undergraduate research projects publishedin CUREJ are among the most heavily used documents in our repository.[click] Since the beginnings of the repository in August 2004, we have uploaded3,036 documents representing a fairly broad spectrum of research, with a decided focuson engineering, since the Engineering School was the ﬁrst unit to sign on. [click] Ofthese documents, only 71 are CUREJ articlesabout 2 percent. [click] But these 71papers, during the month of September, generated 10 percent of the downloads.[click]We had 11,492 downloads of documents deposited in ScholarlyCommons@Pennin September, and 1,015 of those downloads were of CUREJ papers. [click] That'san average of 11 downloads per paper per day during the month of September.[click] Looking back at the most popular paper on the CUREJ site, the Sudsand Selfhood article, there have been 3,243 downloads during the 17 months it's beenavailable; that's an average of 191 downloads each month, or about seven times eachday for the past year.[click] Looking here at the ten most frequently downloaded papers, based on theaverage number of full-text downloads per day since the paper was posted, four of thepapers are from CUREJ, and the second paper, although not in CUREJ, is based onthe research reported in the video by Emily Buzzle that Dennis showed you an excerptof a few minutes ago.78.2 Inspiration to other units[click] As a result of the popularity of CUREJ and the publicity it's generated, we'vehad inquiries from other schools about setting up a similar journal for undergradu-ate research. The head of the Research Scholars Program in the Wharton School ofBusiness contacted us last year about setting up a Wharton Undergraduate ResearchJournalWURJ if you will (I'm afraid it doesn't have quite the same ring to it asCUREJ). So other schools are sitting up and taking notice and want to provide theirown students with a publication opportunity like CUREJ.[click]9 Conclusion [DeTurck]8

Publishing Undergraduate Research Electronically

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Publishing Undergraduate Research Electronically

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